How Does The Brain Make Decisions? 🧠

Thinking, Fast and Slow: Daniel Kahneman on How We Think — A bat and ball cost 1,100 bucks in total. The bat costs 100 bucks more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? What’s the immediate answer that comes to you mind? According to renowned psychologist Daniel Kahneman, We've got two modes of thinking: System 1 (fast and less efficient) and System 2 (slow and more efficient).

Are You an Unproductive Employee? 👨‍💼

Is Your Workplace Decreasing Your Productivity? — When it comes to making decisions, your ability to think through problems is important. Consider this as your raw mental horsepower. But most of us never tap into our available horsepower because we are hampered by one important aspect: our environment. The sad truth is that most of us make decisions in an environment where it is very hard for us to behave rationally.

Are You Afraid to Die? ☠️

Terror Management Theory — A basic psychological conflict results from having a self-preservation instinct while realising that death is inevitable. This conflict produces terror, and the terror is then managed by embracing cultural beliefs, or symbolic systems that act to counter biological reality with more durable forms of meaning and value.

A Damn Good Read 📖

Poor Economics is written by 2019 Nobel laureates, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. I read it a couple of years back after a friend recommended it to me. It is a good read for anybody who has even the slightest interest in psychology and economics.

This book will give you a good idea about why poverty isn’t just about money or wealth. As with all things that involve human beings, thing are never this simple. Poverty isn’t a money problem. It’s a human problem. This is why top-down policies by institutions and policy-makers often don’t work.

These are people, and people have habits, nuances, and biases. Unless you consider human behaviour, no people problem can really be solved. If you have some basic understanding of behavioural economics, you would thoroughly enjoy this book. Most likely, you would see it from a very different perspective.

“All too often, the economics of poverty gets mistaken for poor economics: Because the poor possess very little, it is assumed that there is nothing interesting about their economic existence. Unfortunately, this misunderstanding severely undermines the fight against global poverty: Simple problems beget simple solutions…To progress, we have to abandon the habit of reducing the poor to cartoon characters and take the time to really understand their lives, in all their complexity and richness.”

Quote to Ponder 🤔

“If you want to understand someone, figure out the narrative they tell themselves about themselves. If you want to change your behaviour, change your narrative. If you want to change someone else’s behaviour, offer them a more compelling narrative they can tell themselves.”

We build narratives to understand something, explain something, fool ourselves into doing or believing in something. We love drama. We add drama into our stories. The more we articulate, the more we storify.

Eventually, what remains is the narrative, sometimes devoid of facts, and it shapes our lives.

As always, please give me feedback. Do you have any comments, questions, or tips that you wish to share? Anything that you liked in today’s edition? Let me know. Just send me a note! 👋